Purpose :
Mild traumatic brain (mTBI) injury is commonly experienced in battlefield, accidents and full contact sports, which affect vision. Inflammation-induced neurodegeneration is expected to play a major role in such visual deficits. In this study, we hypothesized that anti-inflammatory proteins released by adipose-derived stem cells (ADSC) can rescue retinal damage and improve visual function.

Methods :
About 12 weeks old C57Bl/6 mice were subjected to 50-psi air pulse on the left side of the head, resulting in an mTBI. Sham-blast mice served as control. After blast injury, 1 µl of human ASDC conditioned medium (ADSC-CM) was delivered intravitreally. One month following injection, ocular function was assessed followed by immunohistological analysis. Efficacy of ADSC-CM in normalizing retinal vascular permeability was assessed by means of trans-endothelial resistance (TER) in the presence of TNF-α (1 ng/mL).

Conclusions :
Our studies suggest that blast injury leads to increased retinal degeneration, which could be ameliorated by ADSC-CM possibly through glial deactivation. Future studies are needed to explore the relationship of anti-inflammatory factors secreted in ADSC-CM with glial activation as a possible mechanism of the observed therapeutic benefit in blast-associated visual deficits.

This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.